Chris Tarrant may not be the world’s greatest superstar, but within the context of this grubby building we’ve come to call home, the wallpaper peeling, the soap in the toilets as hard as rock, the evidence dragging on and on, he is a vision of paradise entering Court 4.
“Has anyone ever got the first question wrong?” asks one defense barrister.
“It’s happened in America,” replies Tarrant, to huge laughter around the court. Tarrant looks surprised. He was just giving a factual response. During all the merriment, the fact that Tarrant heard no coughing, suspected no foul play, and even said to the show’s producers, “Don’t be stupid,” when he was told of their suspicions, seems to have got lost.
Rod Taylor, Celador’s head of marketing, gets a big laugh, too, during his evidence about how he frisked Charles shortly after he’d “won” the million. Taylor offers to frisk one of the barristers to show him how he did it. That gets a laugh. In the dock, Charles begins to cry.
“Why then?” I ask him at Starbucks the next day. “Why did you cry at that moment?”
I often meet Charles and Diana at Starbucks. I discovered early on that if I happen to be there at 9:05 a.m., this is exactly when Charles queues up. We make small talk. Five minutes a day. That adds up, in my reckoning, to a substantial exclusive interview.
“It was when Mr. Aubrey [Tecwen Whittock’s barrister] was cross-examining Rod Taylor and he said something and everyone laughed,” replies Charles.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He made a joke,” says Charles. “Here I am, this cataclysmic event, my family on the line, and everyone is laughing. And you know how I feel about not wanting to look stupid.”
“What was the joke?” I ask. “What was the exact thing he said that made you cry?”
Charles pauses. Then he says, “It was when Mr. Aubrey said to Rod Taylor, ‘Did you search his privates?’”
• • •
THIS STORY BEGINS in 2000. Tecwen Whittock was watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? one night when he recognized a contestant but couldn’t remember where from. I could have told him. It was my old school pal, Diana’s brother, Adrian Pollock.
“That’s the same guy,” Tecwen realized, “who was on a few weeks ago. He’s been on four times now! I think I’ll track him down and ask him what his secret is.”
Tecwen is a quiz-show veteran. He keeps a journal of trivia, of random facts and figures accrued over the years. He’s been on Fifteen to One, although he was eliminated in the first round. He didn’t fare much better on The People Versus. He managed to Beat the Bong, whatever that means, but still only won £500. Sale of the Century was another disaster. “I convinced my wife I’d win a car, but in fact I won the booby prize of a world atlas,” he later tells the court. He had, however, once made it to the semifinal of Brain of Britain.
Tecwen hoped to buy a silk bed for his dog, Bouncer, and a Reliant Robin for his son, Rhys, who was a member of the Only Fools and Horses fan club and wanted to drive the same car as the Trotters. Plus, he had credit-card debts from his children’s private education. He wondered if Adrian Pollock might give him tips on becoming a contestant, so he tracked him down to St. Hilary, a village near Cardiff, and staked out his home.
“He seemed normal,” Tecwen later told the police. “A couple of kids. A dog.” When he later read that he and Marcus were supposedly involved in some Internet scam, he thought, “Uh-oh. Suspicious.”
Tecwen introduced himself to Adrian, who was flattered by his curiosity. They went to the pub, where Adrian took on the role of Tecwen’s mentor, imparting his secrets. First, Adrian told Tecwen, keep calling Celador’s premium-rate phone line. Adrian had himself phoned 1,700 times. Second, when the random selector asks you a trivia question, try and answer it in a computer voice. Adrian had come to believe that Celador had programmed the selector to weed out certain regional accents.
He took his mentoring of Tecwen very seriously. He and Marcus visited Tecwen’s home. They spoke on the phone twenty-seven times. Adrian even asked Diana to become Tecwen’s co-mentor.
“What did you talk to him about?” asks Hilliard, when he cross-examines Diana about her relationship with Tecwen.
“The closest-to question,” replies Diana.
The “closest-to” is the question the Millionaire researchers ask you over the phone if you’ve been randomly selected and are now down to the last hundred possible contestants. It is always a numerical question: “How many radio stations are there in North America?” for example.
“They can be quite hard,” explains Diana. “They’ve always got a numerical answer that could be anything, really.”
“And that’s the kind of insight you were offering Tecwen Whittock, was it?” asks Hilliard. “That they’re quite hard and could be anything really?”
In fact, shortly before the arrests, Adrian and Diana delivered a manuscript of a book to John Brown Publishing, offering tips on how to get on to Millionaire. Both Diana and Adrian had won £32,000 in the hot seat. John Brown was ready to publish, but the arrests changed all that.
Meanwhile, over in Devizes, Wiltshire, Adrian had loaned his brother-in-law, Charles, his pretend mock-up Fastest Finger First console. Charles practiced being fast-fingered on it. He phoned and phoned the random selector. He didn’t, however, imitate a staccato computer voice. He thought Adrian’s conspiracy theory about that was far-fetched. In fact, he later tells the court, he really doesn’t like Adrian and Marcus.
“I don’t like Diana getting involved in whatever it is they do,” he says, adding that Adrian and Marcus have a history of harebrained get-rich-quick schemes.
Back in Cardiff, Tecwen repeatedly called the Millionaire random selector in a staccato voice. “Before I knew it,” he tells the court, “it worked. I was on.”
Tecwen was booked to appear on September 10, 2001. Charles got on too—on September 9. Even though the prosecution says that some other plot was probably in operation that evening, involving buzzing pagers strapped to Charles’s body—or perhaps to Marcus’s body as he sat in the audience—Charles didn’t do well. He made it to £4,000 but lost two of his lifelines before the recording ended. Still, he survived to carry on the following night. Chris Tarrant announced the names of the Fastest Finger contestants who’d be joining Charles in the studio. Second on the list was Tecwen Whittock.
Charles told the police that the first he’d heard of Tecwen Whittock was two weeks later, on September 25, when the Sun named him as the mysterious cougher. He says the first time he met him was just a few weeks ago, right here at Southwark Crown Court. Certainly, in the dock, they studiously behave as if they are strangers. However, Diana’s mobile telephone bill shows that at 11:02 p.m. on the night of September 9—as the Ingrams were driving home from the studio down the M4—she phoned Tecwen for just over five minutes. Diana says the call was simply to congratulate her fellow Millionaire devotee on getting on to the show, and that Charles was asleep at the time. The prosecution says the call was for the three of them to put the coughing plot into action, a plot that must have been vaguely hatched during the “mentoring” conversations of the previous weeks.
When Detective Sergeant Williamson told me a few days ago that “proper criminals” plead guilty, I asked him what made the Ingrams and Tecwen not proper criminals. He said, “They may have engaged in a criminal act, but they don’t have criminal minds. They made too many stupid mistakes.”
One stupid mistake, he said, was that they called each other on their own phones. Another was that, at the Millionaire studio on September 10, neither Charles nor Diana said a word to Tecwen. How suspicious for Diana “the mentor” not to say hello to her student, especially when they’d been on the phone with each other just hours earlier. Diana says she didn’t talk to Tecwen because she didn’t know what he looked like. The most stupid mistake of all—say the police—was that they made it so bloody obvious.